Downtime in Dahkla

So, we're still alive, but the bus ain't kicking yet. We had one more valiant effort with the bus from some fellow challengers before they settled in and prepared for a very early start tomorrow morning. The last five or so teams (besides us) will be heading out into the desert tomorrow morning. We'll be meeting with the town master mechanic. Things aren't looking too good in our cup's tea leaves, but we're keeping our hopes and our spirits up for the time being. With nothing better to do than watch the computer take fifteen minutes to render a webpage or a half hour to send an email, and being quickly bored with counting the number of flies crawling across my arms (five at last count), I thought I'd load up some more pictures onto the blog. Who knows, maybe the added bandwidth will actually cause the entire western sahara backbone to collapse, depriving countless local young men of their daily intake of illegal music videos and causing a massive upswell in civil unrest and political instability. If only we could be so lucky. One of the few upsides to our current mess is a roof top bar and pool at the hotel that would make a worth set for Miami Vice. A strictly Muslim Miami Vice, sans bikinis (or women), booze or smokes. And, in the case of our hotel, without any chlorine in the pool.

Someday, boys and girls, maybe you'll get lucky enough to hear what it is like to towed for 175 kilometers behind a drunk towtruck driver on a four foot tow line in the middle of the night on an unmarked and poorly paved road. Let's just say that cars may be real, but semis are scary.

This is what a short school bus looks like when it is broken down in Western Sahara:


This is the view from the broken down bus:

These things take so long to load that i'm going to start creating separate blog entries for each post. Watch me now! I think Jenna's blogging at the same time, so don't get confused. I have some stuff of Mike's to upload, too, just to make it all as confusing as possible.